Engineering Education Research WG @ SEFI 2018

Engineering Education Research WG @ SEFI 2018

The Working Group of Engineering Education Research is happily looking back at the SEFI 2018 conference. In different activities the members of our working group have contributed to the advancement of engineering education research.

During the doctoral symposium 17 PhD researchers and multiple seniors of the engineering education research domain discussed their ongoing research. Both “juniors” and “seniors” were challenged during the jigsaw activities to come up with one take home message. One of the most popular take home message was to try to “focus, focus, focus” the research within a PhD. A valuable lesson for us all.
A organizers, the take home message is that this event is very valuable to support the engineering education research community. Therefore, our working group is already taking the first step of repeating this doctoral symposium next year!

Rather than organizing a traditional business meeting, our working group organized a workshop where the members of the presented themselves and their research in 3 minutes and discussed with the participants afterwards. More than 40 people joined the session and discussed with one or more seniors. A clear indication for the growing engineering education research community!

Finally, in our “real” working group’s workshop titled “key references in engineering education research” the more than 40 participants challenged our organizational skills and flexibility. Afterwards, they worked hard on exploring key references in engineering education research, first by studying one paper in detail, next by discussing this paper within a small group, and next by comparing the different papers. This session embodied one of the corner stone of high quality engineering education research: read and discuss the literature!